Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: a new kind of fundamentalism

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2002 07:10:22 -0400

At 12:17 PM 10/3/02 +0200, Lionel Vidal wrote:
>Jordan:
> > > Chapter one:
> > > ...
> > > You can learn the language described here with assurance that
> > > (unlike previous versions of Lojban and Loglan, as well as most
> > > other artificial languages) it will not be subject to further
> > > fiddling by language-meisters.
> > > ...
> > >
> > > If even the book's author disclaims that goal, as you claim he
> > > would, then this language is seriously fucked.
>
>I always wondered why it should be so. Why any language evolution should
>spoil it?

Because a large percentage of possible Lojbanists will utterly reject 
attempting to learn a language that they think will change on them. If the 
changes are in the language prescription, this feeling seems to intensify, 
as evidenced by the history of Loglan/Lojban ("contact me if you ever stop 
fiddling with the language and start USING it"). Any change significant 
enough to render a statement in the reference work of choice (the word 
lists, CLL, and shortly Nick's lessons) incorrect, is sufficient to cause 
this despair. The people in question find learning languages to be 
*painful* and relearning to be obnoxious. They also tend to be 
perfectionists who do not like to ever be incorrect. The Lojban aim at 
unambiguity probably attracts such people and heightens their chagrin when 
something that they've learned no longer means what they thought it meant, 
or has become incorrect due to language change.

Natural language evolution usually doesn't make things "wrong" so much as 
obsolete, and not necessarily even harder to understand. This makes 
natural language changes a little easier to take. Even so, in the English 
community, writers who decry novelties in usage as a decline in our 
education systems find a ready audience.

>I mean, most of the proposed changes (and these are very few
>anyway, as most of the time discussions deal more with interpretations)
>are minor in the sense they do not change the fondamental structure or
>flavor of lojban.

They make the job of learning the language more difficult. They make even 
10 year old texts in the language seem archaic (natural language doesn't 
evolve anywhere near that fast, except for teenage slang). People aren't 
willing to find something they wrote a few years ago considered to be 
unintelligible.

>New cmavos, new usage of old ones, even new gismus
>are just the sign that lojban is living like any other natlang.

If it happens by prescription (and most of the jboske discussion is 
inherently prescriptive), then it is NOT like a natlang. When the language 
changes ONLY by someone initiating a novelty, usually without explaining 
it, and it propagates through the user community without ANYONE explicitly 
telling another that this is the way it "should" be done, then that is 
"living language". When Lojban reaches that stage, a baseline freeze will 
be harder to justify.

> The chapter
>one disclaimer could have as well made a list of minor things that
>could changed: would that have hindered your lojban interest?

For many people, yes. The growing lexicon, in the absence of a dictionary, 
is enough of a stress

>The first time I've been in Australia, even after tuning my ears to the
>local english phonetic understanding :-), I still needed to ask my
>australian friends what they meant, because of specific local english
>usage. You may say that was because I am french, but my american
>fellows, although most of them were too proud to admit it, were often
>as lost as me!

Do you think that they LIKE being lost? They are forced into that 
circumstance if they want to survive in Australia, but they aren't going to 
seek out a language that consciously forces them to relearn stuff regularly 
in order to maintain their understanding of what others are saying.

>Note also that in natlangs, linguistic norms, being grammatical or lexical,
>have never prevented users to make their language evolve.

Users don't consciously make the language evolve. It does evolve, but at a 
pace that is dictated by usage drift.

>That being said, I do find reference manuals useful, as they are invaluable
>as learning tools.

And even minor errors in reference manuals probably cause you to distrust 
the value of the entire manual.

> > So thankfully the massive amount of fiddling which you are hilariously
> > referring to as "jboske" is more or less inconsequential.
>
>You seem to regret the existence of different kind of "lojbanists". But
>every one is free to have his own objectives when considering lojban.

Lojban tolerates the existence of many kinds of Lojbanist, but the 
existence of multiple language prescriptions is not so easily 
tolerated. The fear is that jboske will inherently lead to multiple and 
contradictory prescriptions. It is only by managing to label the jboske 
discussions "inconsequential" that many people will consider Lojban as 
being "done" and therefore worth spending the time to learn.

lojbab

-- 
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org